Archive::Tar provides an object oriented mechanism for handling tar files. It provides class methods for quick and easy files handling while also allowing for the creation of tar file objects for custom manipulation. If you have the IO::Zlib module installed, Archive::Tar will also support compressed or gzipped tar files.

An object of class Archive::Tar represents a .tar(.gz) archive full of files and things.

Read the given tar file into memory. The first argument can either be the name of a file or a reference to an already open filehandle (or an IO::Zlib object if it's compressed) The second argument indicates whether the file referenced by the first argument is compressed.

The read will replace any previous content in $tar!

The second argument may be considered optional if IO::Zlib is installed, since it will transparently Do The Right Thing. Archive::Tar will warn if you try to pass a compressed file if IO::Zlib is not available and simply return.

Note that you can currently not pass a gzip compressed filehandle, which is not opened with IO::Zlib, nor a string containing the full archive information (either compressed or uncompressed). These are worth while features, but not currently implemented. See the TODO section.

The third argument can be a hash reference with options. Note that all options are case-sensitive.

If set to true, immediately extract entries when reading them. This gives you the same memory break as the extract_archive function. Note however that entries will not be read into memory, but written straight to disk.

All files are stored internally as Archive::Tar::File objects. Please consult the Archive::Tar::File documentation for details.

Returns the number of files read in scalar context, and a list of Archive::Tar::File objects in list context.

Check if the archive contains a certain file. It will return true if the file is in the archive, false otherwise.

Note however, that this function does an exact match using eq on the full path. So it cannot compensate for case-insensitive file- systems or compare 2 paths to see if they would point to the same underlying file.

Write files whose names are equivalent to any of the names in @filenames to disk, creating subdirectories as necessary. This might not work too well under VMS. Under MacPerl, the file's modification time will be converted to the MacOS zero of time, and appropriate conversions will be done to the path. However, the length of each element of the path is not inspected to see whether it's longer than MacOS currently allows (32 characters).

If extract is called without a list of file names, the entire contents of the archive are extracted.

If list_files() is passed an array reference as its first argument it returns a list of hash references containing the requested properties of each file. The following list of properties is supported: name, size, mtime (last modified date), mode, uid, gid, linkname, uname, gname, devmajor, devminor, prefix.

Passing an array reference containing only one element, 'name', is special cased to return a list of names rather than a list of hash references, making it equivalent to calling list_files without arguments.

Write the in-memory archive to disk. The first argument can either be the name of a file or a reference to an already open filehandle (a GLOB reference). If the second argument is true, the module will use IO::Zlib to write the file in a compressed format. If IO::Zlib is not available, the write method will fail and return.

Note that when you pass in a filehandle, the compression argument is ignored, as all files are printed verbatim to your filehandle. If you wish to enable compression with filehandles, use an IO::Zlib filehandle instead.

Specific levels of compression can be chosen by passing the values 2 through 9 as the second parameter.

The third argument is an optional prefix. All files will be tucked away in the directory you specify as prefix. So if you have files 'a' and 'b' in your archive, and you specify 'foo' as prefix, they will be written to the archive as 'foo/a' and 'foo/b'.

If no arguments are given, write returns the entire formatted archive as a string, which could be useful if you'd like to stuff the archive into a socket or a pipe to gzip or something.

The path to the file is automatically converted to a Unix like equivalent for use in the archive, and, if on MacOS, the file's modification time is converted from the MacOS epoch to the Unix epoch. So tar archives created on MacOS with Archive::Tar can be read both with tar on Unix and applications like suntar or Stuffit Expander on MacOS.

Be aware that the file's type/creator and resource fork will be lost, which is usually what you want in cross-platform archives.

Takes a filename, a scalar full of data and optionally a reference to a hash with specific options.

Will add a file to the in-memory archive, with name $filename and content $data. Specific properties can be set using $opthashref. The following list of properties is supported: name, size, mtime (last modified date), mode, uid, gid, linkname, uname, gname, devmajor, devminor, prefix, type. (On MacOS, the file's path and modification times are converted to Unix equivalents.)

Valid values for the file type are the following constants defined in Archive::Tar::Constants:

Archive::Tar needs to know the current directory, and it will run Cwd::cwd()every time it extracts a relative entry from the tarfile and saves it in the file system. (As of version 1.30, however, Archive::Tar will use the speed optimization described below automatically, so it's only relevant if you're using extract_file()).

Since Archive::Tar doesn't change the current directory internally while it is extracting the items in a tarball, all calls to Cwd::cwd() can be avoided if we can guarantee that the current directory doesn't get changed externally.

To use this performance boost, set the current directory via

use Cwd;
$tar->setcwd( cwd() );

once before calling a function like extract_file and Archive::Tar will use the current directory setting from then on and won't call Cwd::cwd() internally.

To switch back to the default behaviour, use

$tar->setcwd( undef );

and Archive::Tar will call Cwd::cwd() internally again.

If you're using Archive::Tar's exract() method, setcwd() will be called for you.

Creates a tar file from the list of files provided. The first argument can either be the name of the tar file to create or a reference to an open file handle (e.g. a GLOB reference).

The second argument specifies the level of compression to be used, if any. Compression of tar files requires the installation of the IO::Zlib module. Specific levels of compression may be requested by passing a value between 2 and 9 as the second argument. Any other value evaluating as true will result in the default compression level being used.

Note that when you pass in a filehandle, the compression argument is ignored, as all files are printed verbatim to your filehandle. If you wish to enable compression with filehandles, use an IO::Zlib filehandle instead.

The remaining arguments list the files to be included in the tar file. These files must all exist. Any files which don't exist or can't be read are silently ignored.

If the archive creation fails for any reason, create_archive will return false. Please use the error method to find the cause of the failure.

Note that this method does not write on the fly as it were; it still reads all the files into memory before writing out the archive. Consult the FAQ below if this is a problem.

Returns a list of the names of all the files in the archive. The first argument can either be the name of the tar file to list or a reference to an open file handle (e.g. a GLOB reference).

If list_archive() is passed an array reference as its third argument it returns a list of hash references containing the requested properties of each file. The following list of properties is supported: full_path, name, size, mtime (last modified date), mode, uid, gid, linkname, uname, gname, devmajor, devminor, prefix.

See Archive::Tar::File for details about supported properties.

Passing an array reference containing only one element, 'name', is special cased to return a list of names rather than a list of hash references.

Extracts the contents of the tar file. The first argument can either be the name of the tar file to create or a reference to an open file handle (e.g. a GLOB reference). All relative paths in the tar file will be created underneath the current working directory.

extract_archive will return a list of files it extracted. If the archive extraction fails for any reason, extract_archive will return false. Please use the error method to find the cause of the failure.

Set this variable to 1 to make Archive::Tar effectively make a copy of the file when extracting. Default is 0, which means the symlink stays intact. Of course, you will have to pack the file linked to as well.

This option is checked when you write out the tarfile using write or create_archive.

By default, Archive::Tar will try to chmod your files to whatever mode was specified for the particular file in the archive. In some cases, this may not be desired. In that case, set this variable to 0 to disable chmod-ing.

By default, Archive::Tar will try to put paths that are over 100 characters in the prefix field of your tar header, as defined per POSIX-standard. However, some (older) tar programs do not implement this spec. To retain compatibility with these older or non-POSIX compliant versions, you can set the $DO_NOT_USE_PREFIX variable to a true value, and Archive::Tar will use an alternate way of dealing with paths over 100 characters by using the GNU Extended Header feature.

Note that clients who do not support the GNU Extended Header feature will not be able to read these archives. Such clients include tars on Solaris, Irix and AIX.

Yes it is, see previous answer. Since Compress::Zlib and therefore IO::Zlib doesn't support seek on their filehandles, there is little choice but to read the archive into memory. This is ok if you want to do in-memory manipulation of the archive. If you just want to extract, use the extract_archive class method instead. It will optimize and write to disk immediately.

Unix has a few filetypes that aren't supported on other platforms, like Win32. If we encounter a hardlink or symlink we'll just try to make a copy of the original file, rather than throwing an error.

This does require you to read the entire archive in to memory first, since otherwise we wouldn't know what data to fill the copy with. (This means that you cannot use the class methods on archives that have incompatible filetypes and still expect things to work).

For other filetypes, like chardevs and blockdevs we'll warn that the extraction of this particular item didn't work.

By default, Archive::Tar is in a completely POSIX-compatible mode, which uses the POSIX-specification of tar to store files. For paths greather than 100 characters, this is done using the POSIX header prefix. Non-POSIX-compatible clients may not support this part of the specification, and may only support the GNU Extended Header functionality. To facilitate those clients, you can set the $Archive::Tar::DO_NOT_USE_PREFIX variable to true. See the GLOBAL VARIABLES section for details on this variable.

The Archive::Tar module can optionally use Compress::Zlib (via the IO::Zlib module) to access tar files that have been compressed with gzip. Unfortunately tar files compressed with the Unix compress utility cannot be read by Compress::Zlib and so cannot be directly accesses by Archive::Tar.

If the uncompress or gunzip programs are available, you can use one of these workarounds to read .tar.Z files from Archive::Tar